Encyclopedia of Russian History

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arguments favoring union of the Orthodox and

Catholic Churches.

Daniel left two collections of original writings

modeled on the encyclopedist Nikon of the Black

Mountain and Joseph of Volokolamsk—one with

sixteen discourses, the other with fourteen mis-

sives. They cover a variety of theological and eth-

ical issues and evince both Nil Sorsky’s and Joseph’s

influences. Daniel composed six other similar ex-

tant pieces and still others now lost. These collec-

tions, however, unlike the Nikon Chronicle and

Daniel’s canonic compilation, never achieved the

authoritativeness and popularity of Joseph’s En-

lightener or Maxim’s works.

See also: BASIL III; IVAN IV; JOSEPH OF VOLOTSK, ST.;

MAXIM THE GREEK, ST.

AVID

M. G

OLDFRANK

DANIEL, YULI MARKOVICH

(1925–1988), translator, author, show-trial defen-

dant.

A native of Moscow, Yuli Daniel fought in

World War II, then studied at the Moscow Regional

Teachers’ Institute. He began his literary career as

a translator of poetry.

During the cultural Thaw that followed Nikita

Khrushchev’s Secret Speech in 1956, Daniel began

to write short stories of his own. These include

“This Is Moscow Speaking” (1962), “Hands” (1963),

and “The Man from MINAP” (1963). Daniel’s sto-

ries were satirical and absurdist. For example, the

protagonist of “The Man from MINAP” is able to

choose the sex of any baby he fathers. To create

a boy, he thinks about Karl Marx at the point of

conception; for a girl, he fantasizes about Klara

Zetkin. In “This Is Moscow Speaking,” a summer

day in 1960 is designated “National Murder Day,”

an obvious—and bold—reference to Stalinist terror.

Even under Khrushchev, Daniel published not

in the USSR, but in the West, under the pseudo-

nym Nikolai Arzhak. Nonetheless, for the time be-

ing, Daniel remained safe from actual persecution.

However, the ouster of Khrushchev in 1964 and

the rise of Leonid Brezhnev brought about a deep

cultural retrenchment. Daniel was among the first

of its victims.

In 1965 Daniel was arrested, with fellow au-

thor Andrei Sinyavsky (who used the nom de plume

Abram Tertz). Both were put on trial in February

1966, accused by the prosecution of “pouring mud

on whatever is most holy and most pure.” The au-

thors were permitted to speak in their own defense,

but the trial was conducted in Stalinist style, with

its outcome determined in advance. Sinyavsky was

sentenced to seven years of hard labor, Daniel to

five years. The Sinyavsky-Daniel trial served as the

regime’s clear sign to the Soviet intelligentsia that

Khrushchev’s liberalism was at an end.

After serving his sentence, Daniel was forbid-

den to return to Moscow. He settled in Kaluga for

a number of years, before finally being allowed to

move back to the capital.

See also: DISSIDENT MOVEMENT; SINYAVSKY-DANIEL

TRIAL

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, Edward J. (1982). Russian Literature Since the Rev-

olution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Terras, Victor. (1994). A History of Russian Literature.

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

OHN

ANNON

DANILEVSKY, NIKOLAI YAKOVLEVICH

(1822–1885), social theorist and pan-Slavist.

Nikolai Danilevsky, a pan-Slavist, introduced

into Russian social thought of the early and mid-

nineteenth century the utopian-socialist ideas of the

French thinker, Charles François Marie Fourier.

Danilevsky’s major writing was his book Russia

and Europe: An Inquiry into the Cultural and Politi-

cal Relations of the Slavs to the Germano-Latin World,

published in 1869.

In his interpretation of socialism as applied to

peasant Russia, Danilevsky developed the idea of

the existing Russian peasant commune, or ob-

shchina, as a unique, progressive, specifically Russ-

ian institution. It contained, he said, the seeds of

cooperative socialism as found in Fourier’s “pha-

lanstery,” or socialist cooperative.

Into his socialist worldview Danilevsky had

added the Russian ingredient of Slavophilism and

pan-Russism. This nationalistic concept that influ-

enced some segments of the Russian intelligentsia

by the early nineteenth century was derived from

German thinkers of Germanophilic persuasion,

DANILEVSKY, NIKOLAI YAKOVLEVICH

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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

such as Herder and Ruckert. In Danilevsky’s con-

struction, not Germany but Russia occupies a lead-

ing position in the world as the standard-bearer of

socialism. At heart, his Slavophilism was not a re-

ligious conception but, in his view, a “scientific”

one.

Danilevsky gave his cyclic theory of history a

specifically Russian twist. In it he incorporated the

historiography of Oswald Spengler as found in the

latter’s Decline of the West. For Danilevsky, the West

and in particular Germany were in the throes of

decadence and demise. Russia, by contrast, was the

wave of the future. In his book, he insisted that

“even today [in the Balkans] the Slavs prefer the

heavy yoke of Islam to the civilized domination of

Austria.” Danilevsky came to the conclusion that

Russia’s interests ran parallel to those of Prussia,

which needed Russian collaboration more than the

other way around. Yet Russia alone, he insisted,

could make the best synthesis of all types of civi-

lization worldwide.

Danilevsky’s views influenced such writers as

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881). Moreover, his

Slavophilism and pan-Russism became a point of

departure for rationalizing tsarist Russian foreign

policy. This expansionist motivation allowed Slavs

to become united as “brothers” around the Russian

core. Polish Slavs, on the other hand, would be ex-

cluded in this brotherhood because Poland was said

by some to be a collective “old traitor to Slavdom.”

Because of his socialist views and his affinity

to the revolutionist Petrashevsky Circle of social-

ists in St. Petersburg, Danilevsky ran afoul of the

tsarist police. As the reputed leading Russian expert

on Fourierism, he, too, was put on trial and im-

prisoned along with the other Petrashevtsy, in-

cluding Dostoyevsky.

Although Bolshevik and Soviet propaganda dis-

avowed Danilevskian Pan-Slavism as a tsarist

dogma, Leninism-Stalinism nevertheless reflected,

in essence, a good deal of this thought. Lenin had

described the Great Russian proletariat as the “van-

guard” of world revolution. Stalin, in turn, echoed

this idea in his tributes to the Great Russians, plac-

ing them above all other peoples in the Soviet vic-

tory over Nazi Germany in 1945. Moreover, in its

domestic imperial policy, Moscow described the

Russians as the elder brother of all nations and na-

tional groups composing the USSR.

See also: DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH; OB-

SHCHINA; PANSLAVISM; PETRASHEVTSY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kohn, Hans. (1953). Pan-Slavism: Its History and Ideol-

ogy. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame.

Venturi, Franco. (1960). Roots of Revolution: A History of

the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-

Century Russia. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

LBERT

L. W

EEKS

DARGINS

The Dargins (or Dargwa) are an ethnic group in

the Republic of Dagestan in the Russian Federation.

At the 1989 Soviet Census they numbered 280,431,

or 15.8 percent of the republic. In the USSR as a

whole there were 365,038 Dargins, of whom over

97 percent considered Dargin to be their native

tongue. Of that same number 68 percent claimed

fluency in Russian as a second language. This

would include a significant majority of the adults.

The Dargins are situated in the area of Kizlyar,

where one of the branches of the Dagestani State

University is found.

The Dargin language is a member of the Lak-

Dargwa group of the Northeast Caucasian family

of languages. In Soviet times it would also have

been included in the larger category of Ibero-Cau-

casian languages. This grouping owed as much to

the politics of druzhba narodov (the Soviet policy of

Friendship of the Peoples) as it did to the reality of

linguistic relation in this diverse collection of lan-

guages found in the Caucasus region. Following the

general pattern of many of the non-Slavic lan-

guages of the Soviet Union, Dargin has had a mod-

ified Cyrillic alphabet since 1937. A Latin alphabet

was utilized from 1926 to 1937 and before that

Dargin was written in an Arabic script.

A modest number of books was published in

Dargin during the Soviet period. From 1984 to 1985,

for example, a total of fifty-one titles appeared. This

compares favorably with other ethnic groups of its

size, but without an ethnic jurisdiction of its own.

A people such as the Abkhaz, with less than a third

of the population of the Dargins, had 149 titles pub-

lished in the same two-year period.

The Dargins have competed with other local

nationalities for position within the diverse Dages-

tan Republic as ethnic politics are manipulated

along with religious identity. The Dargins have tra-

ditionally been Sunni Muslims, with the strong in-

DARGINS

364

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

fluence of Sufism characteristic in the Caucasus re-

gion.

See also: CAUCASUS; DAGESTAN; ISLAM; NATIONALITIES

POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Karny, Yo’av. (2000). Highlanders: A Journey to the Cau-

casus in Quest of Memory. New York: Farrar, Straus

and Giroux.

AUL

REGO

DASHKOVA, YEKATERINA ROMANOVNA

(1743–1810), public figure, author, and memoirist.

As director of the St. Petersburg Academy of

Sciences and president of the Russian Academy,

Princess Yekaterina Romanovna Dashkova (née

Vorontsova) was one of the first women to hold

public office in Europe. By any standard, Dashkova

led a remarkable life: She was born in 1743 to a

prominent Russian noble family, the Vorontsovs.

After losing her mother at the age of two,

Dashkova grew up in the household of her uncle,

Count Mikhail Vorontsov, where she received the

best instruction available for young women. Yet,

as she points out in her Memoirs, Dashkova felt

compelled to supplement her education with in-

tensive reading of authors such as Voltaire, Mon-

tesquieu, and Helvétius, and demonstrated a lively

interest in politics from her earliest years. Her pas-

sion for learning, and for theories of education,

would prove constant throughout her life.

In 1759 Dashkova married Prince Mikhail

Ivanovich Dashkov and bore him three children in

quick succession: Anastasia (1760–1831), Mikhail

(1761–1762), and Pavel (1763–1807). Their mar-

riage was happy, but short-lived: Mikhail died af-

ter a brief illness in 1764, leaving Dashkova with

the task of paying his debts and rearing their two

surviving children. Significantly, Dashkova chose

never to remarry. Moreover, her relationship with

her children became the source of recurring sorrow

to Dashkova, who outlived her son and disinher-

ited her daughter.

By far the most significant figure in Dash-

kova’s life, however, was Empress Catherine II,

whom Dashkova met in 1758, while the former

was Grand Duchess and twice the age of the fif-

teen-year-old Dashkova. According to Dashkova,

the attraction between the two was immediate, if

only because—as she writes with some exaggera-

tion in her Memoirs—“there were no other two

women at the time . . . who did any serious read-

ing” (p. 36).

The defining moment in Dashkova’s life took

place in 1762, when the young princess took part

in the palace revolution that overthrew Peter III and

brought Catherine, his wife, to power. While his-

torians continue to debate the precise role that

Dashkova played in the coup, Dashkova places her-

self at the center of the revolt in her Memoirs.

Catherine initially rewarded Dashkova’s loyalty

with gifts of money and property. Within a short

time, however, the relationship between the two

women deteriorated—the result, perhaps, of

Dashkova’s exalted claims for her role in Cather-

ine’s ascension to the throne.

Following the death of her husband in 1764,

Dashkova spent much of the next two decades in

self-imposed exile from the Russian court. From

1769 to 1771, and again from 1775 to 1782,

Dashkova traveled abroad, overseeing her son’s ed-

ucation in Scotland and meeting with prominent

figures of the Enlightenment, such as Diderot,

Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, and Adam Smith. Af-

ter Dashkova returned to Russia, in 1783 Cather-

ine appointed her director of the Academy of

Sciences, which the previous director had left in

considerable disarray. Not only did Dashkova re-

store the fortunes of the Academy—much as she

would affairs on her various estates—but she also

inspired Catherine to found the Russian Academy,

with the goal of compiling the first Russian ety-

mological dictionary and fostering Russian culture.

In her role as director of both academies, Dashkova

was instrumental in bringing Enlightenment ideas

to Russia. Dashkova also wrote and published ex-

tensively: She translated works on education,

travel, and agriculture; composed verse and several

plays; and oversaw the publication of several jour-

nals.

After quarrelling with the empress over the

publication of the Yakov Knyazhnin’s play Vadim

Novgorodsky, which Catherine claimed was an at-

tack on autocracy, Dashkova requested a leave of

absence from the Academy in 1794. Catherine’s

death in 1796 brought further misfortune to

Dashkova: In order to punish her for the role she

played in the downfall of his father, Emperor Paul

exiled Dashkova to a remote estate in northern

Russia. One year later, after Dashkova appealed

for clemency on the grounds of ill health, Paul

DASHKOVA, YEKATERINA ROMANOVNA

365

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

permitted her to return to Troitskoye, her estate

near Moscow. Paul’s death and the accession of

Alexander I to the throne in 1801 brought an end

to Dashkova’s exile, but she chose to spend her re-

maining years at Troitskoye, managing her hold-

ings and writing her celebrated memoirs.

As a historical figure, Dashkova remains sig-

nificant for her prominent role in the intellectual

life of eighteenth-century Russia: She exemplified

the Enlightenment ideal of the educated woman, or

femme savante, and inspired both admiration and

anxiety among her contemporaries for her unusual

achievements. Furthermore, her accomplishments

illuminate central themes in the social and cultural

history of Russia: female intrigue and patronage

during the era of empresses; the persistence of no-

ble family politics in the emerging bureaucratic

state; and the Russian reception of the Enlighten-

ment.

See also: ACADEMY OF SCIENCES; CATHERINE II; PETER III

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dashkova, E. R. (1995). The Memoirs of Princess Dashkova:

Russia in the Time of Catherine the Great, tr. and ed.

Kyril Fitzlyon, with an introduction by Jehanne M.

Gheith. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

ICHELLE

AMARCHE

ARRESE

DASHNAKTSUTIUN

The Hay heghapokhakan dashnaktsutiun (Armenian

Revolutionary Federation, ARF, Dashnak Party, or

Dashnaktsutiun) was founded in 1890 in Tbilisi,

by Russian Armenian intellectuals, in order to help

Armenians in the Ottoman Empire obtain economic

and political reforms. The party established branches

throughout the Ottoman and Russian Empires as

well as in Europe and the United States. At differ-

ent times the party supported guerrilla activities,

political action, and Western intervention as means

to achieve its goals in the Ottoman Empire.

In the Russian Empire the Dashnaktsutiun led

the opposition to the anti-Armenian policies of the

tsarist government (1903–1905) and, subsequently,

the militia forces that clashed with Azerbaijani

Turks in the Caucasus during the revolution of

1905–1907. In 1914 it supported a Russian plan

for reforms in Ottoman Armenia. During World

War I it also organized Russian-supported Armen-

ian volunteer units in Eastern Armenia to help Ar-

menians in the Ottoman Empire.

The genocide committed by the Young Turk

government against the Armenian population

ended the presence of the party in Turkey. With

the disintegration of the Russian Empire, the Dash-

naktsutiun led the first independent Armenia,

1918–1920, only to cede power to the Bolsheviks

in 1920. The party, along with other noncommu-

nist groups, was banned from Soviet Armenia.

In the diaspora the Dashnaktsutiun focused on

community-building, representing Armenians in

host countries, and pursuing national aspirations

internationally. Until the 1960s that meant a free

and independent Armenia. Beginning in the 1970s,

the party shifted its focus from an anticommunist

and anti-Soviet crusade to an anti-Turkish cam-

paign for the recognition of the genocide and ter-

ritorial reparations from Turkey, for which Russian

and USSR support was considered essential.

The Dashnaktsutiun has claimed a special po-

sition in Armenian history through its maximalist

demands for the reconstitution of historic Arme-

nia. Having reestablished itself in Armenia in 1990,

the party reserved the right to resist by force any

government it considered unacceptable; it opposed

the leadership of the national movement that rose

in Armenia in 1988 and accepted with reluctance

the country’s declaration of independence in 1991.

Vehemently opposed to the first president, Levon

Ter-Petrossian, it has been more supportive of the

second, Robert Kocharian. Nonetheless, despite sub-

stantial contributions from its diasporan segment,

the Dashnaktsutiun has been unable to make sig-

nificant gains in Armenia’s elections.

The Dashnaktsutiun is a tightly knit, discipli-

narian organization with grass roots mechanisms

in many communities. It is financed mainly by

membership dues and donations by sympathizers.

See also: ARMENIA AND ARMENIANS; CAUCASUS; NA-

TIONALISM IN TSARIST EMPIRE; NATIONALITIES POLI-

CIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST;

TURKEY, RELATIONS WITH

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Libaridian, Gerard J. (1996). “Revolution and Liberation

in the 1892 and 1907 Programs of the Dashnakt-

sutiun.” In Transcaucasia, Nationalism and Social

Change, rev. ed., ed. Ronald G. Suny. Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press.

DASHNAKTSUTIUN

366

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Ter Minassian, Anaide. (1984). Nationalism and Social-

ism in the Armenian Revolutionary Movement. Cam-

bridge, MA: Zoryan Institute.

ERARD

J. L

IBARIDIAN

DECEMBRIST MOVEMENT

AND REBELLION

Secret society, active from 1816 to 1825 in Russia,

named after its unsuccessful revolt in Saint Peters-

burg on December 14, 1825.

The Decembrist movement began as a secret so-

ciety named the Union of Salvation, active from

1816 to 1818 in St. Petersburg. The Union of Wel-

fare, created in 1818, followed. The latter existed

until 1821, united more than two hundred mem-

bers, and had branches in St. Petersburg, Moscow,

Kishinev, and other cities of the Russian empire.

Both societies were organized by young officers

who had recently returned from a foreign military

campaign during the Napoleonic wars. Convinced

that the Russian army had granted freedom to

European people, these liberally minded and

well-educated young members of the Russian no-

bility were disappointed by the politics of Alexan-

der I, whose reforming plans outlined at the

beginning of his reign were not realized. Observing

the steep growth of nationalism in Europe, and fol-

lowing the tradition of “love for the fatherland” of

the Russian educated nobility in the late eighteenth

and early nineteenth centuries, the Decembrists

were inclined toward extreme patriotism. They

imagined the Russian people as a nation and acted

in its name. Taking as an example the German Tu-

gendbund (Union of Virtue), active in Prussia

throughout Napoleon’s occupation, members of se-

cret societies claimed the national revival as their

main aim. In particular, this nationalistic tendency

expressed itself in demands for the discharge of for-

eigners from Russian positions of authority.

Freemasonry, with its idealism and moral impera-

tive on the one hand and secrecy and ritualization

on the other, also contributed to the movement.

Many participants of Russian secret societies were

simultaneously members of Masonic lodges.

The main goal of the Union of Welfare was

to influence public opinion. Its members aspired

to create favorable conditions for constitutional

reforms in Russia aimed at the moral and spiri-

tual improvement of the elite and society as a

whole. Many members were engaged in the es-

tablishment of Lancaster’s school system in Rus-

sia, as they believed it promoted enlightenment

among the poor classes and in the army. Litera-

ture, playing an important role in Russian public

life since the reign of Catherine the Great, was also

an important field of activity for the Union of

Welfare and other Decembrist societies. Many De-

cembrists contributed to Russian political lyrics

and literary romanticism and were members of

various literary societies. The conspirators Kon-

draty Ryleyev, Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky,

and Wilhelm Kuchelbecker were famous writers

of their time.

New secret societies created on the basis of the

Union of Welfare were more conspiratorial and bet-

ter organized. The Southern Society, with its ab-

solute leader, colonel Pavel Pestel, appeared in 1820

in Tulchin; and the Northern Society was founded

in 1821 in St. Petersburg. Nikita Muraviev and

Nikolai Turgenev were the main figures of the lat-

ter society. In the summer of 1825 the Southern

Society took members of the Society of United

Slavs, hoping to create a Pan-Slavic confederation.

The conspirators discussed projects of the Russian

constitution and ways of performing an armed re-

volt and regicide.

Pestel’s Russian Justice, accepted as a program

of the Southern Society, and Muraviev’s “Consti-

tution” were the most representative of the De-

cembrists’ constitutional projects. Both projects

provided for the abolition of serfdom. Muraviev of-

fered constitutional monarchy, a federal organiza-

tion of the country, and property qualification at

elections. Pestel’s radical project provided for cre-

ation of a centralized Jacobin-like republic and spe-

cific land reform, dividing land into private and

public sectors. According to Pestel’s project, dicta-

torship of a provisional government was to last ten

to fifteen years after the revolt, whereas the lead-

ers of the Northern Society suggested early election

of authority.

Immediate cause for the conspirators to act was

the succession crisis. On November 19th, 1825,

childless Alexander I died unexpectedly in the south

of Russia in Taganrog, far from the capital. Ac-

cording to the law of 1797, the oldest of his broth-

ers, Grand Duke Konstantin, Viceroy of Poland,

was to become the successor. However, in 1820

Konstantin had entered a morganatic marriage, and

in 1822, in a private letter to Alexander, he had

abandoned his right to the Russian throne. In 1823

DECEMBRIST MOVEMENT AND REBELLION

367

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

Alexander signed a manifesto wherein he proclaimed

his next eldest brother Nicholas the successor. It

is unknown why this document was kept secret

from the public. When news of the death of

Alexander reached the capital, the general governor

of St. Petersburg, Mikhail Miloradovich, convinced

Nicholas that the guards were not loyal to him and

would consider his accession to the throne a usurpa-

tion. Nicholas and the army swore allegiance to

Konstantin, who was residing in Poland. The lat-

ter was not willing to accept authority, and yet he

did not renounce it publicly. In the dangerous sit-

uation of interregnum, Nicholas became emperor

and set the new oath of allegiance for December 14.

Taking advantage of disorder in the troops and

government, members of secret societies decided to

persuade soldiers not to swear an oath to Nicholas.

The plan of revolt was developed in Ryleyev’s

apartment on the night of December 13. The con-

spirators composed a manifesto to the Russian

people, in which “the abolition of the former gov-

ernment” was proclaimed. Colonel Prince Sergei

Trubetskoy, one of the leaders of the Northern So-

ciety, was appointed as the leader of the revolt.

Unfortunately for the conspirators, not all

those officers and troops expected to participate in

the revolt actually gathered. Trubetskoy seemed to

lose nerve and did not lead the mutineers. About

three thousand soldiers were lined up in combat

readiness on the Senate Square with thirty officers

as their leaders. The nearest streets were crowded

with people. The troops loyal to Nicholas sur-

rounded the square. For several hours the troops

stood opposite each other. A few attempts to per-

suade the soldiers to return to their barracks were

made, and General Governor Miloradovich was fa-

tally wounded by retired lieutenant Pavel Kakhovsky.

At last Nicholas gave an order to open fire, and the

revolt was suppressed.

Despite the defeat in the capital, and despite Pes-

tel’s arrest on December 13, the southern conspir-

ators, including the members of the United Slavs,

decided to act. Sergei Muraviev-Apostol and Mikhail

Bestuzhev-Ryumin supervised the revolt. On De-

cember 29 the conspirators managed to persuade

soldiers of the Chernigov regiment to start out for

the capital. On January 3, 1826, the government

troops stopped the mutineers and defeated them.

A special investigation committee was created

to determine the circumstances of the conspiracy.

The High Criminal Court condemned to death five

Decembrists: Pestel, Ryleyev, Muraviev-Apostol,

Kakhovsky, and Bestuzhev-Ryumin. They were

hanged in St. Petersburg on July 13, 1826. Thirty-

one officers were sentenced to lifelong hard labor.

The other officers and soldiers were sentenced to

different terms of hard labor, disciplinary battal-

ions, and exile. By the amnesty declared in 1856

after Alexander II’s accession, Decembrists were al-

lowed to reside in the central part of Russia and re-

gained their nobility privileges.

See also: FREEMASONRY; PANSLAVISM; SLAVOPHILES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mazour, Anatol. (1967). The First Russian Revolution,

1825: The Decembrist Movement, Its Origins, Develop-

ment, and Significance. Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-

versity Press.

Raeff, Marc, ed. (1966). The Decembrist Movement. Engle-

wood Cliffs, NY: Prentice-Hall.

Riasanovsky, Nicholas. (1976). A Parting of the Ways:

Government and the Educated Public in Russia,

1801–1855. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Saunders, David. (1992). Russia in the Age of Reaction and

Reform, 1801–1881. London: Longman.

LENA

EMSKOVA

DECREE ON LAND

Upon seizing power from the Provisional Govern-

ment in October 1917, the Bolsheviks immediately

issued two decrees. The first decree served to with-

draw Russia from World War I. The second decree

issued by the new Bolshevik regime was entitled

“On Land.” The decree abolished property rights of

landlords and provided for the confiscation of es-

tates with no compensation. More generally, the

Decree on Land abolished private ownership of land

and introduced the nationalization of land. Under

the terms of the decree, about 150 million hectares

of arable land, pasture land, and forest land were

confiscated and distributed to 25 million commu-

nal households. The October 1917 land decree was

followed by legislation in January 1918 that for-

bade the selling, renting, or mortgaging of land.

Nationalized land became the possession of “all the

people” and could be used only by those who cul-

tivated it. Although all land was nationalized, in-

dividuals or families could obtain allotments of land

for small-scale agricultural activities, assuming

that they themselves used the land and did not em-

ploy hired labor. These land plots included collec-

DECREE ON LAND

368

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY

tive garden plots, private plots, and dacha plots, the

size of which was restricted by local norms.

The prohibition on leasing land remained until

March 1990, when a USSR law on land came into

effect. Legal restrictions on private ownership of

land remained in effect until December 1990 when

a law was passed in the RSFSR that permitted the

ownership of land, subject to certain constraints.

See also: BOLSHEVISM; OCTOBER REVOLUTION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Danilov, Viktor. P. (1988). Rural Russia Under the New

Regime. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Keep, John L. H. (1976). The Russian Revolution: A Study

in Mass Mobilization. New York: Norton.

Medvedev, Zhores A. (1987). Soviet Agriculture. New

York: Norton.

Volin, Lazar. (1970). A Century of Russian Agriculture:

From Alexander II to Khrushchev. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press.

TEPHEN

K. W

EGREN

DEDOVSHCHINA

A term used for “hazing” in the Russian military

from the Russian word for grandfather.

This set of practices, a long-standing feature of

Soviet army life, appears to have accelerated dra-

matically in the 1990s. Observers note that “haz-

ing” is itself a problematic translation, because it

fails to grasp the severity of the systematic vio-

lence, humiliation, and torture visited upon new

conscripts by their elders. Official estimates place

the number of conscripts murdered at the hands of

their comrades-in-arms at perhaps a thousand per

year. Independent organizations, including the

well-known advocacy group for military con-

scripts, Soldiers’ Mothers, estimates that as many

as three to four thousand conscripts are murdered

each year by other soldiers and believes that a large

number die as a result of the collective practices

known as dedovshchina. The problem has also con-

tributed significantly to the very high rate of sui-

cide evident in the Russian armed forces. Anatol

Lieven argues that nothing has done more to de-

stroy morale and cohesion than the problem of de-

dovshchina. The lack of an effective system of

non-commissioned officers, capable of providing

the disciplinary structure and rule-enforcement

necessary to head off such hazing, contributes sig-

nificantly to the widespread nature of these abuses.

The general lack of resources available to the Russ-

ian military in the 1990s, including the basic means

of life, such as food, have also contributed to ero-

sion of military morale, which many observers say

has contributed to the high level of atrocities com-

mitted by Russian forces in the two campaigns in

Chechnya, from 1994 to 1996, and from 1999 to

the present. Lieven sees dedovshchina as a symbio-

sis between tyranny and anarchy in which rules

and restraints are crippled “leaving only a veneer

of autocratic but in fact powerless authority over

a pit of chaos, corruption, and a host of private

tyrannies.”

See also: NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lieven, Anatol. (1999). Chechnya: Tombstone of Russian

Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Weiler, Jonathan. (1999). “Human Rights in Post-Soviet

Russia: Progress or Regression?” Ph.D. diss., Uni-

versity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

ONATHAN

EILER

DEFECTORS, SOVIET ERA

Defectors (perebezhchiki) during the Soviet era were

people who left the Soviet Union without permis-

sion and in violation of Soviet law. Soviet author-

ities applied the term defection more broadly than

in the West, where a defector is usually defined as

an individual who has committed treason by co-

operating with a hostile foreign intelligence service.

Because Soviet citizens were prohibited by law from

leaving the country to settle elsewhere, anyone

who sought political asylum in another country

was labeled a defector and a traitor. This included

scientists, artists, film directors, dancers, writers,

musicians, scholars, journalists, and seamen. (The

term did not apply to writer Alexander Solzhenit-

syn or cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who were

forcibly exiled; the dissident Vladimir Bukovsky,

who was brought to the West as part of an ex-

change; or former KGB general Oleg Kalygin, now

residing in the United States, who criticized the KGB

publicly but remained a Soviet citizen.)

Among well-known Soviet defectors who fall

into the broader category were Stalin’s daugh-

ter, Svetlana Alliluyeva; ballet dancers Rudolph

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Nureyev, Natalia Makarova, Mikhail Baryshnikov,

and Alexander Godunov; pianist Dmitry Shostako-

vich; theater director Yuri Lyubimov; and chess

grandmaster Viktor Korchnoy.

In addition many Soviet defectors betrayed

their country by passing on secrets to Western in-

telligence. Often they wrote books about their ex-

periences. Among the earliest such defectors was

NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs)

officer Walter Krivitsky, who sought asylum in the

United States in 1937, wrote the book I was Stalin’s

Agent, and died under mysterious circumstances in

1941. Another NKVD officer, Viktor Kravchenko,

the author of I Chose Freedom, defected to the United

States in 1944 and died in 1966. Igor Gouzenko, a

cipher clerk for Soviet military intelligence (GRU),

turned himself over to Canadian authorities in Ot-

tawa, Canada, in 1945. Gouzenko’s revelations

about the Soviet spy network in the West, sup-

ported by documents he brought with him, helped

to spark the Cold War. Intelligence officer Peter

Deryabin sought American asylum in Vienna in

1953, later writing several books about his career

in the Soviet secret services. In 1954 KGB agents

Vladimir and Yevdokia Petrov defected in Australia

and later settled in the United States, where they

published Empire of Fear in 1956. KGB officer Ana-

toly Golitsyn defected to the United States in 1961,

reporting that the KGB had placed an agent at the

highest levels of American intelligence, but unable

to give details to identify the agent. Oleg Lyalin, a

KGB officer posing as a trade official, defected to

Britain in 1971. Alexei Myagkov, a KGB captain

serving in Germany, defected to West Berlin in

1974, later writing Inside the KGB: An Expose by an

Officer of the Third Directorate. Arkady Shevchenko,

a high-ranking Soviet diplomat serving at the

United Nations, defected in New York in 1978. In

1985 he published a best-selling book entitled

Breaking with Moscow. Stanislav Levchenko, a KGB

officer posing as a journalist, defected in Japan in

1979 and now resides in the United States. Ilya

Dzhirkvelov, a KGB officer now living in Britain,

defected while working under cover for the Soviet

news agency TASS in Switzerland in 1980. He later

wrote Secret Servant: My Life with the KGB and the

Soviet Elite. Among other KGB officers who defected

to Britain in more recent years were Vladimir

Kuzichkin, a KGB officer who was working in Iran

before he sought asylum in 1982; and Oleg

Gordievsky, a high-ranking KGB colonel who had

collaborated secretly with British intelligence since

1974 and escaped to the West in 1985.

For Western intelligence services, one challenge

was to establish that the Soviet defectors were gen-

uine and were not acting as double agents for the

KGB. When Yury Nosenko, a middle-level KGB of-

ficer, offered himself to the CIA in Geneva in 1962,

a debate ensued over his bona fides that lasted for

ten years and seriously impaired CIA operations

against the Soviet Union. Another controversial

case was that of Alexander Orlov, an agent of the

Soviet NKVD, who defected to Spain in 1938 and

ended up in the United States. Orlov, whose book

The Secret History of Stalin’s Crimes created a sensa-

tion when it appeared in 1953, passed on infor-

mation to the CIA and the FBI, but some historians

have claimed that he remained loyal to the Soviets.

When high-ranking KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko

defected to the United States in 1985, it was an

enormous blow to the KGB, because he passed on

details of KGB secret agents and operations to the

CIA. But when Yurchenko apparently became un-

happy with his treatment by the CIA and, after a

few months, slipped away and re-defected to the

Soviet Union, the case was highly embarrassing to

American authorities.

See also: COLD WAR; IMMIGRATION AND EMIGRATION;

STATE SECURITY, ORGANS OF

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrew, Christopher, and Gordievsky, Oleg. (1990).

KGB. The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from

Lenin to Gorbachev. London: Hodder and Stroughton.

Krasnov, Vladislav. (1985). Soviet Defectors: The KGB

Wanted List. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.

NIGHT

DEMOCRATIC PARTY

The Democratic Party of Russia (DPR) since its

founding in 1990 has changed its face radically at

least three times. It was created by politicians, in-

cluding radical anticommunists as well as “com-

munists with a human face,” as a counterbalance

to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

(CPSU). The first split happened as early as the con-

stituent assembly, and a number of well-known

politicians left the party, unhappy with the selec-

tion of Nikolai Travkin, leader of the CPSU Demo-

cratic platform, as sole chair. In the 1993 elections,

the DPR, whose list was headed by Travkin, film

director Stanislav Govorukhin, and academician-

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economist Oleg Bogomolov, received 3.0 million

votes (5.5%, eighth place) and fourteen seats in the

Duma. The second split happened in 1994, when

Travkin entered the government; the majority of

the fraction, charging him with compromise,

elected a new leader, economist Sergei Glaziev, who

had left Boris Yeltsin’s administration in 1993. The

DPR changed from “Travkin’s party” into “the

party of Glaziev-Govorukhin.” The DPR did not

participate independently in the 1995 elections. Its

leaders joined three ballots: Glaziev was third on

the KRO list, Govorukhin headed the Stanislav Gov-

orukhin Bloc, and Bogomolov was third on the “So-

cial-Democrat” list. None of the three lists crossed

the five-percent barrier. In 1996, with the depar-

ture first of Glaziev from the DPR (via the Congress

of Russian Communities to the Communist Party

of the Russian Federation, or KPRF), then Gov-

orukhin (via the KPRF to Fatherland—All Russia, or

OVR), the DPR came to be led by little-known func-

tionaries. In the 1999 elections, the party first be-

came a co-constituent of the bloc “Voice of Russia,”

then moved into the bloc “All Russia,” and van-

ished completely with the formation of OVR.

When, in the fall of 2001, an attempt was made

to restore the former popularity of the old brand,

and the Novgorod governor Mikhail Prusak was

elected leader of the DPR, many viewed this as an

endeavor on the part of the Kremlin to create a tame

right-centrist party to replace the Union of Right

Forces (SPS), which was not sufficiently compliant.

Prusak announced at the time that the “The DPR

will most likely become a party of the center, with

a clear structure in observance of the principle of

single management. This will be a national party,

whose tasks will include the construction of a

democratic civil society, fortification of the gov-

ernment, preservation of its territorial integrity,

formation of a middle class, and development of

national product.” In 2002, having created forty-

nine regional branches with a total of more than

10 million members, the DPR was able to register

again as a political party with the Ministry of Jus-

tice.

Prusak was not sufficiently dedicated to party

matters, and at the 2003 congress the DPR deposed

its leader. It was announced that the party would

enter federal elections for the first time in ten years

but that the position of leader would probably be

vacant.

See also: POLITICAL PARTY SYSTEM; UNION OF RIGHT

FORCES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution:

Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press.

McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Trou-

bled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities,

and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution

Press.

Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy

of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democ-

racry. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press.

IKOLAI

ETROV

DEMOCRATIC RUSSIA

The movement Democratic Russia (DR) is a relic of

the end of the Soviet epoch, when opposition arose

to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU),

the only party at the time. Founded in October

1990, it initially united practically all the anticom-

munist opposition. Its predecessor was the bloc of

candidates “Democratic Russia” in the March 1990

elections for people’s deputies to the RSFSR and lo-

cal soviets. Numbering up to 205 delegates in con-

gresses from 1990 to 1993, the group “Democratic

Russia,” after the introduction of a prohibition

against membership in more than one fraction, split

into several fractions, two of which—“Democratic

Russia” and “Radical Democrats”—composed the

DR movement. In the 1991 presidential elections,

DR and the parties belonging to it, including the

DPR (Democratic Party of Russia), SDPR (Social-

Democratic Party of Russia), Peasant Party of Rus-

sia, Russian Christian Democratic Movement, and

the Republican Party of the Russian Federation,

supported Boris Yeltsin, who won for his first term.

After the “victory over the communists,” two

tendencies struggled within the movement: One fa-

vored turning it into a broad coalition of parties

and organizations, the other favored making a sin-

gle organization of it, allowing collective and indi-

vidual membership. As a result, parties broke off

from DR: first the Democratic Party of Russia, the

Constitutional-Democratic Party—Party of Peo-

ple’s Freedom, and the Russian Christian-Demo-

cratic Movement (1991), then, in 1992 and 1993,

the Social-Democratic Party of the RF, the Repub-

lican Party of the RF, the People’s Party of Russia,

and the Free Democratic Party of Russia. In the

1993 elections, DR was one of four co-constituents

of the bloc “Russia’s Choice,” but by the end of

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1994, most of the members of the movement, en-

tering the Duma on the lists “Russia’s Choice” and

“Yabloko,” dissociated themselves from the move-

ment, and its co-chairs, delegates Lev Ponomarev

and Gleb Yakunin, left the fraction Russia’s Choice.

At the outset of the 1995 campaign, the DR lead-

ers created a federal party, DemRussia, and, along-

side the Movement, established a bloc Democratic

Russia and Free Trade Unions, which ultimately

bowed out of participation in the elections, to the

advantage of Russia’s Democratic Choice (DVR) and

Yabloko. In 1996 the co-chair of DemRussia, Galina

Starovoytova, tried to establish candidacy for the

presidential elections; in 1998 she was murdered in

St. Petersburg in hazy circumstances.

In 1999 the Movement became one of a num-

ber of constituents of the bloc “A Just Cause,” and

in May 2001 it dissolved along with other demo-

cratic parties, becoming part of the Union of Right

Forces (SPS). Up to the moment of its dissolution,

according to the party’s president, Sergei Stanke-

vich, the party had about six thousand members,

including two thousand activists. Never having

been a leadership-oriented, monolithic, disciplined

structure, DemRussia retains its character in its

afterlife. Not all regional branches of the move-

ment and party agreed with the idea of dissolu-

tion; from time to time the name DemRussia is

mentioned in connection with various pickets and

meetings (against the war in Chechnya, concern-

ing anniversaries of the founding of the move-

ment, protection of the White House, and so

forth), as well as in connection with routine uni-

fication initiatives of the democrats.

See also: CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY; DEMOC-

RATIC PARTY; POLITICAL PARTY SYSTEM; UNION OF

RIGHT FORCES; YABLOKO

BIBLIOGRAPHY

McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia’s Unfinished Revolution:

Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press.

McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Trou-

bled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities,

and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution

Press.

Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy

of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democ-

racry. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press.

IKOLAI

ETROV

DEMOCRATIC UNION

The Democratic Union (DS) is a radical liberal

party, the first political organization to emerge as

an alternative to the Communist Party of the So-

viet Union (CPSU), formed out of the dissident

movement shortly after the beginning of pere-

stroika. It was established in May 1988 on the ba-

sis of the seminar “Democracy and Humanism,”

which began in the summer of 1987. The Democ-

ratic Union’s nonconformism distinguishes it from

democratic parties that appeared later. Political ten-

dencies that initially coexisted in the DS alongside

the liberal—such as social democratic or Eurocom-

munist tendencies—gradually broke off. Under the

strain of numerous ideological and personal dis-

agreements, the DS went through numerous splits.

Where internal conflict arose between radical and

more moderate elements, the radical always gained

the upper hand.

The Democratic Union’s political activity con-

sisted mainly of conducting unsanctioned meet-

ings and making sensational announcements. In

the words of DS leader Valeria Novgorodskaya

(chair of the central coordinating council from

1996), DS activists were “genuine Bolsheviks, al-

beit with an anticommunist leaning.” In Decem-

ber 1992, on the initiative of Novgorodskaya and

N. Zlotkin, the party “Democratic Union of Rus-

sia” (DSR) was established, declaring itself a con-

stituent of the DS. In the spring of 1993, the DSR

supported Boris Yeltsin in the conflict with the

Congress of People’s Deputies, regarding him as a

“fighter against Soviet power,” and broke sharply

with the DS, which continued to view the presi-

dent and government as heirs of the Communist

regime. Novgorodskaya’s group was excluded

from the Moscow DS organization, and from that

point on, the DS and DSR existed separately. After

troops were brought into Chechnya in 1994, the

DSR moved into extreme opposition to the gov-

ernment, idealizing the Chechen side in the mean-

time. In 1996, the DSR first called for a repeal

of the presidential elections, in order to avoid a sit-

uation in which “the formal observation of demo-

cratic procedures leads to the liquidation of

democracy,” then it supported the candidacy of

Grigory Yavlinsky after Yeltsin’s second term.

During the Yugoslav crisis, the DS unequivocally

sided with the U.S. and NATO and announced that

it would send a detachment of volunteers to the

Balkans as aid to NATO, headed by Novgorod-

skaya.

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